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October 2009 Search Share: Google, Bing Make Strides

November 18, 2009 - by MarketingCharts staff

Americans conducted 14.3 billion core searches in October 2009, with Google Sites accounting for 65.4% search market share, up slightly from 64.9% in September, according to the monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the US search marketplace.

While Yahoo continued to rank as the #2 search provider, at 18.0%, it was down 0.8 percentage points vs. September. Microsoft Sites (which includes Bing), at #3, grabbed 9.9% market share, up 0.5 percentage points.

Ask Network captured 3.9% of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.9%, comScore said.

Americans conducted 14.3 billion searches in October 2009, up 3% from September – in part because October is a longer month. Google Sites accounted for 9.4 billion searches (up 4%), followed by Yahoo Sites (2.6 billion, down 1%), Microsoft Sites (1.4 billion, up 8%), Ask Network (552 million, up 2%) and AOL LLC (412 million, down 1%).

October 2009 US Expanded Search Rankings

In the October analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites once again led the search market with 13.5 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.7 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.5 billion. Bing experienced the largest growth of the top -0 expanded search properties with an 8% increase in query volume to more than 1.2 billion searches.

comScore vs. Nielsen

In terms of the top search providers, comScore’s findings are similar to search-share data from The Nielsen Company, which is calculated using a different methodology. Nielsen earlier this month reported 10.2 billion US searches on the top search engines in October 2009. Of these, a slightly higher share, 66.1%, took place on Google, while Yahoo – at 15.4% and Bing – at 9.7% had slightly lower shares.

Not surprisingly, Nielsen found that Google, with 6.8 billion searches, continues as the top-ranked search provider. In those rankings, Yahoo and Bing are #2 and #3, while – in contrast with comScore, Nielsen ranked AOL ahead of Ask Network to round out the top five.